The 'Good Enough' Approach to Language Comprehension

By Fernanda Ferreira, Nikole D. Patson. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2007

640 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d8d23fadf7be4916bf3b24b3354260c469c5de87

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Reverse Island Effects and the Backward Search for a Licensor in Multiple Wh-Questions (2011, background): “Second, much recent research on real-time sentence processing has revealed specific scenarios in which the parser does not follow syntactic rules strictly, at least not initially (Townsend & Bever 2001; Ferreira, Ferraro & Bailey 2002; Ferreira & Patson 2007; Phillips, Wagers & Lau 2011).”
Scanpaths reveal syntactic underspecification and reanalysis strategies (2012, background): “…is mainly supported by studies demonstrating that readers often fail to provide accurate answers to comprehension questions relating to garden-path sentences (e.g., Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001; see Ferreira et al., 2002 and Ferreira & Patson, 2007 for an overview).”
Getting real about semantic illusions: rethinking the functional role of the P600 in language comprehension. (2012, background): “What is more, not all inferences that are in principle possible will actually be drawn because our language system seems heavily influenced by task demands and may take the ‘good enough’ approach to language understanding (Ferreira and Patson, 2007).”
Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism (2011, background): “John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved as a ‘fall back’ option that has the advantage of being redundant rather than ambiguous; a type of ‘heuristic’ that even native speakers may employ when the use of syntactic computation is less available (see e.g., Ferreira & Patson, 2007).”
Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations (2013, background): “…argued that full reanalysis required more cognitive effort than readers with lower working memories were willing or able to expend, and so these readers settled for ''Good Enough'' reanalysis and interpretations (Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002; Ferreira & Patson, 2007; Ferreira et al., 2001).”
Different speakers, different grammars: Individual differences in native language attainment (2012, background): “Indeed, Ferreira (2003; see also Ferreira, Bailey and Ferraro 2002 and Ferreira and Patson 2007) has argued that this happens quite often: the representations constructed by the pseudo-parse are “good enough” for most everyday purposes.”
Discourse conditions on subject pronoun realization: Testing the linguistic intuitions of older bilingual children (2009, background): “Thus, when ambiguity is not at stake native speakers may resort to a ‘good enough’ strategy (Engelhardt et al., 2006; Ferreira et al., 2002; Ferreira and Paxton, 2007) that involves shallow, least-effort encoding or interpretation.”
Parsing and Working Memory in Bilingual Sentence Processing (2016, background): “While earlier formulations of ‘good-enough’ parsing described misinterpretation in such cases in these terms (e.g., Ferreira, Bailey & Ferraro, 2002; Ferreira & Patson, 2007), more recent research has shown that these types of misinterpretations need not implicate an underspecified parse, but…”
What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension? (2015, neutral): “…slower per-word reading times (Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997; MacDonald, Just, & Carpenter, 1992; Spivey-Knowlton, Trueswell, & Tanenhaus, 1993) and poorer comprehension accuracy (Ferreira, Christianson, & Hollingworth, 2001; Ferreira & Patson, 2007).”
SOME NOTES ON THE SHALLOW STRUCTURE HYPOTHESIS (2017, methodology): “The SSH is based upon multiple-pathways models of language processing that were originally proposed to account for findings from L1 processing research (see Ferreira & Patson, 2007; Karimi & Ferreira, 2016, for review and discussion).”